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| © Image: AllAboutSamsung |
By Jacob Kastrenakes, The Verge
Samsung’s Galaxy S10 will be one of the first smartphones to support the faster Wi-Fi speeds offered by Wi-Fi 6. Regulatory filings from Samsung, spotted by Droid Life, reveal that three models of the upcoming phone will include support for the brand-new Wi-Fi standard.
Those speed gains won’t do much right away, though. Almost no one has a Wi-Fi 6 router, and you’ll need one to take advantage of Wi-Fi 6’s improvements. Wi-Fi 6 also doesn’t offer immense speed gains for individual devices. It’s supposed to improve performance in homes or on Wi-Fi networks where a ton of devices are connected (say, a home with a bunch of smart gadgets installed), and those devices will need Wi-Fi 6 to really see benefits, too.
Still, it’s a feature worth having. It makes the phone a bit more future-proof, and if you buy a new router in the next couple of years, it’ll likely bring Wi-Fi 6 support to your home.
There haven’t been many Wi-Fi 6 devices so far, but the Galaxy S10 suggests that could be about to change. The phone likely comes with Qualcomm’s new top-of-the-line processor, the Snapdragon 855, which includes support for Wi-Fi 6. That chip isn’t being widely used yet, but it should end up in many of this year’s flagship Android phones, bringing some of the first Wi-Fi 6 devices to the market.
Samsung is expected to announce the Galaxy S10 at the end of the month. We’re expecting three models at launch: a standard S10, a larger S10 Plus, and a lower-cost S10E. A 5G version is also expected later on.
